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Monday, 29 August 2011

The connectome: Into the brain and beyond

As you may know, I am not a fan of contemporary neuroscience that attributes to the brain the central processor function that you may encounter in a computer.

Of course, it must be there for a reason and it is probably not just there to cool blood as Aristotle believed

As you may also know, I am currently studying the brain (again) using a complex network approach. The video below is a very impressive talk I came across on TED. Although I would go much further and be more radical about what it is that is connected, or rather nested this talk very elegantly gives an insight in the overwhelming complexity that is involved. Yes, much more complex than a machine that obeys the algorithmic laws of computation.

http://youtu.be/HA7GwKXfJB0

http://www.ted.com/talks/sebastian_seung.html

Just ignore the technology fallacy at the end (i.e. if we wait for bigger, better, fancier technology, we'll know everything...). Where are the robots?